right on his side. In every Christian Land it was and is the law that a man may not marry his brother's wife, and the dictum of the Lutheran doctors, 'fieri non debet, factum valet,' is but a very lame and unsatisfactory way of getting over the difficulty. To take a case in some respects parallel, and which, if I mistake not, has actually happened in one of the English noble families within the last century. A and B live together unmarried, and after the birth of a son, C, they see the error of their ways and marry, and another son, D, is afterwards born. D, and not C, is the heir to his father's title and estates, and no subsequent act of the parents can alter their respective positions. So, too, the marriage of Henry and Katherine being unlawful from the beginning, mere lapse of time or other subsequent occurrence could never make it valid. Then comes the question of the papal dispensation on which alone its claim to validity could rest, and on this there were three possible views, some of which admit of subdivision, and all of which were actually adopted by different parties to the dispute. The extreme antipapal view would be that the dispensation made no difference—that that which was unlawful before was unlawful after it. The moderate view would raise the further question whether such a marriage was void by the law of God, or only by human enactment, and declare the dispensation valid or not according to the answer. The extreme papal view, on the other hand, maintained that whether the invalidity depended on the law of man or of God, the Pope's dispensation was an adequate remedy. Finally, the subject was still further complicated by the question raised as to whether Katherine had ever really been the wife of Prince Arthur or not, and which made the validity or
